The Suicide Girls models come up with some great aliases for themselves. Two of my faves are “Roach” and “Napalm.” This chick just wasn’t trying that hard, but I can’t blame her for showin’ some homeland pride. However, that name which takes the cake as the best to date (imo) is “Fractal.” Sweet!

Okay, so like two years ago I got called upon by the Academy of Art to be one of their Illustration Dept. representatives via these banners they put up on the sides of their 79 New Montgomery building. Here're some photos that Jenn took:

You may notice that beneath my three names (artsy!) and that photo of my swollen, swollen head is an "artist statement" that I drunkedly composed one night, set aside for soberer times, and whittled from like 1,000,000 words down to 150. I wrote:

“I’ll try not to just draw and wait for something to happen. Too often people think that logging hours into a craft is enough to master it, as if skill were a paycheck. Awareness is just as important as time invested – the artist has to be conscious of where his drawings take him, good or bad.

This awareness can be faked to an extent, and even result in financial success. But in its purest form it could be described as love. Love for craft such that the artist treats art as something to fight for instead of a means for self-promotion. Success will come after love by nature, though other people might find it hard to define what exactly that success is.

Sounds pretty naive, right? But still. I don’t think my 50-year-old self would regret that I wrote this.”

I regret the grammar and some of the word choice, but not the cheese. At the end of "Serenity," Malcolm Reynolds says more or less the same thing about flying spaceships (and life - duh), but with much cooler verbage.

You know what's neat, though!? The posters've been taken down since the Academy's fall semester started, but they're up on google streetview! HahahahaHA!

And by "2007," the banner means "December 7, 2007," which is like tomorrow.For the last two years I watched Derek pump out amazing digital art for his game, while also balancing his work with a healthy social-life. But of late Derek's (and no doubt his compadre Alec's) existence has been all Shaolin. He's sacrificed life-amenititties like sleep and sunlight to make his final pre-release days count. And if the game's as good as I seen it mid-development, then by tomorrow it's going to be stellar. "Aquaria" is an old-school shooter/platformer RPG set underwater with a really immersive environment (i.e. addictive time-sink). When you're not destroying wildlife, riding the crystal-turtle-public-transit-system or dodging lasers spewed from the maw of some aquatic demi-god, you're probably just swimming around, watching your character grow up, gazing stupidly at your vast and nuanced surroundings. How does one create this shit? With love, fool. With love. Check it out here.

Next:

Volume 1 of the Popgun anthologies is (sold) out. Hopefully I can get a copy next week. It's a collection of limited-print/unprinted one-shots by established artists coupled with short comics from people who haven't made it in the scene yet. My favorite of the internet previews so far is from this dude Sheldon Vella. Lotsa talent in lotsa book (450 pages)!

And:

I'm trying to learn some more digital painting techniques and I started a DeviantArt account. Maybe with the above painting I can gain DA 'spect by cornering the "dinosaur panties" searchstring.

For those of you Photoshop nerds, here's what happens when I take the painting, set its layer mode to "overlay," and place it over a layer comprised of muted yellows varying in value:

A quick skim of my past entries and I’m thinking, “boy, I can sure be an eejit sometimes.”But what’s there to do, right?One can only hope that I'll learn to bypass the parts of my brain that’re nuked for good and get better at writin’, drawin’, considerateness, outlook on life and complete-er thoughts.

And about writing: I have to come up with a story.Like, not a story I’d just circulate amongst friends, or put in my diary with all the unicorn stickers on it.This thing is supposed to reach a pretty intimidating demographic.The script is crazy FUN to make.But also, for somebody like me who thinks intellectual stimulation means drawing robots in perspective, it can get really fuckin’ HARD.

Kazu Kibuishi’s blog has this excellent post about writing anxieties.His main point: audiences empathize with creators in a genre/medium (fantasy comics) where deadlines compromise storytelling, as a result lowering expectations for both readers and people behind the scenes.The essay was a great read when I first ran into it, but it hits closer to home now when I’m trying to string a plot together without pulling tricks out of my ass like time-travel, amnesia, or body-swapping.

I also wanna share this quote by Alan Martin, Tank Girl scribe:

Use swear words frequently and explicitly.And be inventive in your abuses – don’t just say "stop crying, tithead.”I try something like, “Your bonce is like a swollen breast and your eyes are akin to two lactating nipples."

A couple years back, a trip to the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse yielded Jake a box of 1,000,000,000 thimble-vial thingies, Ultimo another item to his “why do I keep driving these retards around” list (Actually, he liked it.), and me this awesome little find:

I was all like a seasoned forensics guy, except with Novocain running through his fingers, extracting the album’s contents and scanning them.The pages were a little fragile and maybe I was over-zealous with the exacto-knife when one of the plastic coatings got tore-up, but at least none of the pictures were harmed.Apparently, they were developed between 1985 and ’86.Here they are:

I went to New York a few weeks ago to visit some family friends. I blasted through Ellis Island, the UN, Ground Zero, Midtown, Grand Central, the MOMA (gift shop), Public Library, SOHO, the upstate 'burbs, and Queens. All in all it's a great city - someday I hope to have more time and scrilla to really soak it in. While resting at Bryant Park for a while, I managed to sketch these people:

Can you tell that the ladies got up to leave before I could draw their legs?

In other news, Blast Off!

Derek, Hellen, and I helped out at the Asian Art Museum's Blast Off! event: kind of like a family arts-bonanza thing to accompany the museum's bitchin' Osamu Tezuka exhibit. Hellen did a screen-printing demo while me and Derek hosted the walk-up mural pictured above. Sooo many cute little kids elbowing for their spot on the paper! I felt like a pusher-man trying to con the more reluctant tykes into drawing: "Do you like... markers? Paints, paints, paints, you lookin' to scrawl on the wall?" It felt really good to see the shysters walk up and really get enthused. My heart swelled to three times its size that day.

The museum's also having SF cartoonists come over every weekend up 'til September to demonstrate their work. Here's the schedule. I'm slated to demo from July 26th to the 29th, which is why I can't make it to ComiCon:(